It appears however that this folder can become full – which means that you can no longer view images in emails.   Instead, you’ll just see a red cross where the picture should be.

There’s apparently a limit of 100 on the number of files with the same name, so for example

image001(01).jpg

image001(02).jpg

etc..

The easy fix is to just clear this folder out periodically as it’s not automatically emptied.

The folder can be found here (using Windows XP as an example):

For Outlook 2000 to 2003:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK*.

For Outlook 2007:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\

Good news!  The popular video streaming service Netflix today announced that they’re expanding their video streaming service to Canada this fall.

There are no pricing details yet, however Netflix have said they’ll offer unlimited movie and TV downloads.

Unlike the American service which offers both video streaming and mail delivery of DVDs and Blu-Rays, the Canadian service will offer streaming only.

A tweet from @tomcritchlow of Distilled this morning had me wondering how the transition to the new site was going:

I first noticed that the PR of the new www.bbc.co.uk/news website is currently 0 – though this is understandable as the PR updates are fairly infrequent.   It’s interesting though that a 301 redirect doesn’t transfer the PR value of the original source page?

Next – I thought I’d take a look at the cached page that Google have for the new home page to see how recent it was.   Here’s the surprising result:

Odd?   Are Google not indexing the new home page?   A check of their robots.txt file didn’t show any problems?

Looking at the robots.txt file – I noticed that the news site has it’s on sitemap:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news_sitemap.xml

Looking through the contents of this file – it looks like there are entries for most languages on the site – but oddly I could not see English in the list?

Is this an oversight or are the BBC just relying on in-links and internal linking to ensure that Google indexes the site.

Here’s the (albeit rough) stats from Google on the number of pages of each site in their index:

Quite a difference!   It’ll be interesting to follow this over the next week to see how the figures change.

What was also interesting was the pages shown in the index.   For the old site, the home page and the top category pages are showing top of the list:

However for the new site – only deeper article pages are shown, which matches what I saw earlier with the home page not showing in the Google cache.

We’ll have to keep an eye on the results over the next few days to see how the statistics change.    It’s certainly a brave move on behalf of the BBC to undertake such a widespread restructuring and maybe the results will help others in similar situations?

I thought it was just me until I came across a post on the twitter support pages asking for feedback.    Looks like others are experiencing the same white screen, and then the app closes after a few seconds of loading.

Here’s the support page at twitter:

Twitter for iphone 3.0.1 crashes back to home screen

Just had a PDF file which opened fine and could be viewed ok, however could not be printed?

When trying to print from any PC – we received the following error:

“Document could not be printed”

Not very helpful!

Turns out, if you click on the Advanced button in the print window – and select “print as image” it goes through fine!

What’s interesting about this update though is that a lot of the changes seem to be SEO driven.   In November last year, BBC editors wrote a blog post explaining how they were already making changes specifically for the benefit of Search Engines.

Site Evolution

Lets start by looking at the evolution of the BBC News website over the years courtesy of the Wayback Machine:

BBC News Website 1998 -1999

BBC News Website 2000 – 2001

BBC News Website 2002 – 2003

BBC News Website 2004 – 2006

BBC News Website 2007 – 2009

As you can see, the layout has stayed fairly static over the years, with the main changes being to fonts, color schemes and additional graphics.

New Design

OK – so now let’s take a look at the new site:

The first thing you notice is that the categories are now across the top of the page, rather than down the left.   This gives the page additional real-estate for larger graphics, and more importantly longer headlines.

I mentioned earlier that the editors had blogged last year about how the site changes were SEO based.   In a post by Steve Herman he explains how they decided to make the headlines on article pages longer for the benefit of search engines (chasing the long tail?)

With the extra space gained by moving the categories to the top of the page, they can now extend the headlines as they did with internal articles.   There are also theories that links higher up the page are given more weight than those lower, in footers or sidebars (as on the original layout).  

Redirect

The next change is quite subtle and I doubt a lot of people will notice – the original home page at http://news.bbc.co.uk now 301 redirects to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news.     Is this a sign of the BBC trying to improve their www. site by sending to link juice and PR it’s way?

Social Media

The BBC have now embraced social media and have added the usual share buttons to all articles as you can see in the screenshot below.

BBC Editor, Steve Hermen said last November “A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page – for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds”.   

This change will make it much easier for readers to share news articles on the major Social Networks.

Link Sculpting

There’s more emphasis on links to other (in particular – popular) articles now – an example of which you can see below:  

More page space has been dedicated to related articles and analysis and there’s also a push to include more media with additional links to image galleries and videos.

By creating additional inter-article linking, is this a sign that the BBC are trying to spread the flow of link juice throughout the site?

Summary

Whether you like the new look or not will be a personal choice, but as you can see from above, it looks like the BBC is taking SEO seriously.  

So seriously, that their willing to use SEO as a reason to change the look and feel of a site which has been popular with readers for many years!

Take a look at the video below for a glimpse into the future of computer interaction!

The photos didn’t need to be high res, so I started looking at how to convert them.   As there were so many I didn’t really want to export each image, compress it and then import it again.

I then found that there’s an easy way to compress all images in a document from within Word!  

In Word 2007, select the Format Tab, and then there’s a “Compress Pictures” option.   You can then apply this to a single picture or to all pictures.

The document size went from 60MB to 900KB – a huge difference!

I’m often searching for free tools to convert between various file formats for clients, and frequently find “free” online converters.   Most of the time, these free converters have limited features or don’t actually work as advertised.

I was pleasantly surprised to find www.pdftoexcelonline.com after I was asked to convert a large PDF table into Excel format.   It’s simple to use – simply upload the PDF and wait for the resulting Excel file to be emailed back to you (only takes a few minutes).  

The results are pretty amazing, with formatting such as layout and colors all converted accurately.

www.pdftoexcelonline.com

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg recently tweeted that Google is building a “Google Me” service to compete with Facebook.

This would be a huge move by Google and would take a lot to win over a lot of the seasoned Facebook users, but with the consumer confidence and a strong technical lead behind them maybe they can do it.

With Facebook recently topping the chart for the most popular website in the US, there’s obviously a reason for Google to step up to the plate and have a go at competing.

Details are still scarce, however the former CTO of Facebook Adam D’Angelo stated on his site that there are many people working on the project.

With the recent anger over privacy settings on Facebook, you have to wonder if Google are pushing to get this release soon to take advantage of the situation?